What was I thinking? I had the perfect How it Started, How it’s Going set-up and I failed to get the before photo. A proxy photo will give you an idea, but this adjacent closet in our temporary abode in Tempe still bears my imprint from last year, when I stacked all the pool towels that had been stuffed all higgledy-piggledy into their assigned space, first folding them so they *could* be stacked.
How it started (proxy photo)
Some of us are independent. Loners, even.
Great blue heron, fishing
Some of us thrive in crowds.
Sandhill cranes, hanging out
Some prefer small groups.
Sandhill cranes, browsing/gleaning
Different strategies–*wildly* different strategies–can work equally well, but it’s good to know who we are.
I don’t get out at night much, but when I do, sometimes I find a nice reflection in a vehicle.
Here’s one from several years ago in Myrtle Beach.
Here’s one from this week in Texas.
It’s a wonderful world, innit?
The sun did not rise this morning.
That’s a steal of, or as I like to frame it, an homage to, a line from The List of Adrian Messenger. In that 1959 detective novel, the sun did not rise in London due to a “pea souper”: a thick, thick fog that blotted out the sun (and that hid a cunning murderer, as it turned out). Today, the sun did not rise in Texas due to a thunderstorm so broad, and with clouds so dark, that the sunrise never broke through.
I can’t claim that travel expands the mind, but I have observed that it expands the waistline and the photography portfolio.
As we headed south from Ottawa en route to Phoenix via Myrtle Beach, we passed through upstate New York. Just a few weeks ago they’d had a few feet of snow dumped on them, apparently to celebrate American Thanksgiving. It’s a local custom, I believe: as a Canadian, I don’t really feel qualified to comment on it. Now that snow was mostly gone.
But all the water in that snow had to go somewhere. Some of it sublimated, likely; some lay in the fields, clearly (but also muckily); some ran off into streams, creeks, sloughs, and ponds, certainly. I’m used to waterways being high in the spring: seeing them high-from-snow-melt in late December was a first.
The hardest thing(y) about this face was figuring out what to call its location. Being for leftovers, it’s not a takeout box. Being a box, it’s not a doggie bag. Quora to the rescue again: it’s a to-go box. I think I knew that. Sort of. Remembering the things I know is getting harder all the time.
Anyway, I present herein a to-go box. With heavily lidded eyes and a chiseled Roman nose.
This week seems to be all about lids and cycles. Who am I to fight fate?
Of course, it could also be about humour in marketing, or about making a personal connection to affect behaviour.
Wait a minute, you say. We can’t have a personal connection with a metal jar lid, can we? Well, all I know is that *this* jar lid got its wish, at least as far as I could grant it: I threw it in the glass/metal recycle bin. It’s up to someone else to finish the job. And that brings in one of my mother’s favourite quotes.
It is not your duty to finish the work,
but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.
– Pirkei Avot, 2:16
It’s true, you know? It’s connections, all the way down . . .
The screen in front of me is not quite the dreaded Windows blue screen of death, but it *is* the black screen of endless updates. In the middle of the screen a message huffily informs me that the downloaded updates are installing and I should sit down and shut up. Perhaps I paraphrase, but I can almost hear it sniffing, impatient with my impatience.
Be still
and know that I am updating.
Below this imperious message, a small arrow chases its own tail around and around in a circle, the hamsters being otherwise engaged, I guess. 
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After a long dry spell, here’s the second face in as many weeks. This one seems more seasonal than the suitcase. I mean, is this not the face of a slightly cross-eyed reindeer?
Of course, given that it’s a Timmy’s cup it could just be Canadiana: a moose, perhaps? Either way, I may never look at a maple leaf, stylized or otherwise, in quite the same way again.
Posted: 2025 Apr 19
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
This space is available for other submissions.
